Hang on for a minute...we're trying to find some more stories you might like.

Email This Story

I have been trying to escape Judaism for a long time. As a child, I hated the services my parents schlepped me along to — they were boring, in a language I didn’t know, and involved a lot of standing. Early in my teens, I braced against my Hebrew school teachers. They all seemed convinced that Israel could not be criticized whatsoever for its violence in retaliation to rocket attacks, no matter how many innocent civilians were killed. Later, in high school, I completely rejected God, identifying passionately as an atheist.

When I got to college, though, it was different. Suddenly, knowledge of the Holocaust was not a given, I encountered open hostility toward Jews, and found the identity I tried so hard to leave behind constantly invalidated at the expense of myself and my loved ones. Instead of fighting my grandmother’s Islamophobia and my synagogue’s ingrained bigotry, my battle in college was against the anti-Semitism of my peers and the intolerance of my institution; no matter how hard I tried escaping Judaism, I ended up having to defend it.

So, I’ve lived a double life, one I created for myself to make it easier to get by. At home, I’m an atheist and a “radical” liberal. I advocate for Palestinian liberation, call out my family’s Islamophobia and try to unpack my own, and stay as far away as possible from organized religion. At Oberlin, however, I’m Jewish. I try to explain that yes, it is possible to be a Zionist and also support Palestinian liberation. I attend community events as much as I feel comfortable, and I vent to my Jewish friends about how we feel on campus.

I wish I didn’t have to do that, but the Jewish people have never had the privilege of escaping their tormentors, and I am no different. Shrugging off my Judaism is a privilege I can never have, and the murders of 11 congregants at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill — 11 of my people — is just another reminder of that.

Depressingly, what shocks and infuriates me about the deaths in Squirrel Hill is not the murders themselves. I have been told stories of death since I was a child, watching elderly men weep as they recounted hearing the gunshots from the SS executing little boys in the woods. Nor am I so shaken by the gun violence, for we live in the midst of so much gun violence and inaction on gun control — after all, this is America, where about 37 Americans are killed with guns each day.

No. The worst thing about these murders is that there are many fellow Jews among us who are responsible; about a quarter of all Jewish voters in fact. They voted for Donald Trump.

He, as Republicans do, promised them unwavering support of the state of Israel and moving the U.S. embassy to the contested area of Jerusalem, and they paid careful attention to those promises. But he also promised a policy of racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and hate, which they blissfully ignored. The Squirrel Hill murders are the result.

If you don’t believe me, you can simply check the shooter’s social media page, where he directly cited the President’s false statements about a migrant caravan as the reason he targeted Tree of Life, which sponsors migrants through an organization called Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Following Trump’s election in 2016, anti-Semitic attacks increased by 57 percent in 2017.

The funny thing about Judaism is that it is a very small religion — less than two percent of Americans identify as Jewish, and the number is even smaller globally. As a kid, it always seemed to me that the quirks of Judaism were structured around that small size, and there was an intense pressure against leaving the faith. My parents were strictly cautioned about marrying out of the religion, and my Hebrew school teachers drilled in the same message. But if we are so obsessed with ensuring our own survival, why do some of us support a president who openly endangers it?

Critics will argue that I should not speak so harshly or politicize the dead, that I should not disrupt the grief felt within the Jewish community. That may have been true once.

But the problem is that these murders are political. Being Jewish and supporting the President without being called out for it is a privilege that people don’t get to have anymore. We as a religious community must get over our fear of speaking out if we ever want to end our own persecution and stop enabling it ourselves.

We also cannot ignore that our struggle against persecution is intimately tied up with that of other communities. Just a few days prior to the murders in Pittsburgh, a white supremacist murdered two Black people in a Kentucky Kroger. I had no idea until after Pittsburgh, and neither did my family. We must do better than that.

Squirrel Hill is not a one-off. Both in terms of guns and anti-Semitism, it is part of a burgeoning phenomenon in America in which violence and hate increasingly combine and result in murders like these. We saw it in Charleston. We saw it in Charlottesville. And we have seen it so many other times. Undoubtedly, this hate has festered for years, stretching long before 2016. But it was released with the Republican party’s embrace of extremism, and that embrace was led by Donald Trump.

We cannot escape our Judaism, and we cannot escape the fact that some of us now have blood on our hands. Jews cannot keep living double lives in which we allow our conservative peers, relatives, and friends to get away with supporting such a hateful president and party without having to be accountable. We have to do more than hold vigils and be sad — we have to broach the uncomfortable political subjects with our family members, ask them who they voted for, and knock on doors. We have to call our rabbis and pressure them to give sermons about social justice, racial justice, and voting, especially when the congregants don’t want to hear it. We must say the victims’ names, and do all that we can to make sure that the next time this happens to us — it’s only a matter of when — that our president didn’t enable it.

The shooter was a raging anti-Semite who also disliked Donald Trump. How in the world can you try to lay the blame for him on Trump?

Joshua Rappaport on
November 4th, 2018 1:00 AM

Very very well written. Kol hakavod.

Man with the Axe on
November 4th, 2018 6:12 PM

An evil man killed innocent Jews. It is Trump’s fault. Therefore it is the fault of the people who voted for Trump. In this way, the people who voted for Bernie Sanders are responsible for the Congressional baseball shooting. Barack Obama is responsible for the shooting deaths of five police officers in Dallas in 2016, and for the Fort Hood shooting in 2009. The people who voted for Obama were therefore also responsible for those deaths.

I like the way you think.

Ummmm on
November 9th, 2018 12:40 PM

It must be said that anti-Zionists, Jewish or not, have also contributed to the rise of antiSemitism buy allowing blatant lies and distortions (e.g. “Israeli apartheid”) to go unchecked, as well as by their open support for some of the most sociopathic political figures on the progressive left (e.g. Linda Sarsour). By that logic, this paper, and people who write in it (which would include you) have blood on their hands.

But honestly, this is a sick position. Jews didn’t kill each other. AntiSemitism is like a mental illness in the West. It isn’t just a set of ideas, its a malicious obsession with a people that, through the turns of a history, have acquired a mythopoeic significance in the West and in the Muslim world. It is not the fault of any practicing Jew. I can’t tell you how depressing this sort of shallow, angry, self justifying political commentary is.

I suggest you read “Anti-Judaism” by David Nirnberg to get a handle on the cultural/religious roots of this disease. To blame laming Trump and the Jews who support him for an antiSemitic massacre displays an insensitivity to the broad issues of social psychology, which are far far deeper, extend millenia into the past, and have a global reach. It’s an argument that is strikingly parochial and illiberal, and unbecoming of anyone educated and thoughtful.

Ummmm on
November 9th, 2018 12:47 PM

Are you sure that none of the victims supported Trump? Have you considered that you might be blaiming the victims of a nakedly antiSemitic attack for the actions of the killer? You do not know. You cannot know, in fact, what was in their hearts, and how they voted.. And yet you did it anyway.

This is not in keeping with any Jewish ethos I know of. Shame is added to tragedy.

Mikaela on
November 9th, 2018 4:04 PM

In response to the comment from “Ummm”: As a Jew, I don’t think that opposing the political situation in Israel & Palestine antisemitic, I consider it to be a political viewpoint, not a religious viewpoint. I disagree with the Israeli government but that has nothing to do with my religious beliefs. PLEASE PLEASE do NOT blame Jewish people like me for the deaths of my fellow Jews. We have not contributed to the rise of antisemitism. We have a political viewpoint and that is all. Jewish people were killed because some crazy guy is hateful and terrible, not because Jewish people oppose Zionism. Reading your comment was very upsetting to me! I am trying to mourn the loss of my people, not enter into a political disagreement.

Mark Behr on
November 9th, 2018 10:46 PM

It is amazing to me how progressives constantly accuse President Trump of being an anti-Semite. Isn’t his son-in-law a religious Jew? Didn’t his daughter convert to Judaism? Didn’t he allow the U.S Embassy to move to Jerusalem when three previous presidents refused to do so even though twice in the past twenty-five years the U.S. Senate voted to do just that? I guess people who hate President Trump will keep repeating he is anti-Semite until the real anti-Semites are satisfied.

Ummmm on
November 11th, 2018 12:06 AM

Mikaela, opposing the actions of the Israeli government is not antisemitic. Allowing distortions ( like Those published in this paper, such as the accusations of “apartheid”) or the tacit acceptance of Farrakhan, or the whitewashing of Linda Sarsour, to go unchallenged DOES contribute to antisemitism. If you wince when people say so, you have an issue.

But we agree: neither Jews who support Trump, nor their opposition are to blame for murderous atrocities. Antisemitism of that nature is an affliction intrinsic to our culture. Thinking it can be prevented by everybody having the right sort of political idea is narcissistic and shallow, and blaming Jews for it is hideous and sick.

Mikaela on
November 11th, 2018 2:30 PM

to “Ummmm”: we do not agree

Ummmm on
November 12th, 2018 10:48 AM

Of course we do not agree.

Many people have a very difficult time understanding that antiSemitism is as much a problem on the left as on the right. Most progressive Jews think that if they can appease the virtue signalling left, things will be better. Well, they won’t. Attacks on Jews come from both sides, and people who blame Jews for antiSemitism, because the Jews in question disagree with their precious political ideas, are simultaneously speaking nonsense and degrading themselves, the victims, and their own people.

Look at this article: the author actually does not know, and CANNOT know the feelings of the 11 victims towards Trump. And yet he goes so far as to blame Trump’s Jewish supporters for their deaths, never thinking that he might be blaming the very Jews he (and you) purport to mourn, for their own murder, and yet people complain that I am politicizing things. Stop and think. Antisemitism is a problem much older and larger than the faddish politics of the Excited States of America.

Please keep all comments respectful and relevant. The Review does not allow comments containing profanity, foul language, personal attacks, hate speech, or the use of language that might be interpreted as libelous. Comments are only published at the discretion of a moderator.